If you haven't gotten the hint, today is all about Llano. The big story is of course Llano's notebook appearance; however, in the coming weeks you'll be hearing a lot more about Llano on the desktop as well. This is AMD's Socket-FM1, the brand new socket that'll be used for desktop Llano parts:

If you read our Computex coverage, the socket should look pretty familiar. Motherboard manufacturers all over Taiwan are busy readying their Socket-FM1 boards for retail release. In fact, there was so much interest in desktop Llano on behalf of the motherboard manufacturers that a number of Socket-FM1 boards and CPUs made their way off the island as Computex ended.

Existing Socket-AM3 coolers will work on FM1 motherboards

By now you may have already seen a lot of information leaked from AMD's Llano presentations, as well as its desktop strategy. In the past few days performance numbers have been revealed as well. While we're hard at work on our full review of AMD's desktop Llano APU, we wanted to chime in with some thoughts on Llano's desktop performance.

AMD isn't ready to disclose pricing or the entire product matrix for Llano on the desktop, but what we do have is the high-end desktop Llano SKU: AMD's A8-3850.

The 3850 has four cores running at 2.9GHz and doesn't support Turbo Core. On the GPU side it has the full Radeon HD 6550D configuration with 400 shader processors running at 600MHz.

Post Your Comment

131 Comments

@seapeople: which version of Excel/processor are you using? Using Excel 2008 on XP I can agree with your experience using a core 2 duo @ 3ghz - in fact I had IT write an executable to open Excel on one CPU only and diabled multi thread calc. However using a Core I5 laptop 2.7ghz quad core with Office 2010/Win 7, spreadsheets that would take ten minutes to update are done in thirty seconds. I appreciate there will be a single threaded performance delta but I don't feel this accounts for such a radical improvement; perhaps the multi threaded suport is getting better as well.Reply